Sidewinders#2 Massacre At Whiskey Flats Read online

As for what the future would bring, there was no way of knowing, but the Texans would mosey across that bridge when they came to it.

  Right now they were coming to a patch of shadow that was thrown across the trail by a stand of pines that crowded up alongside it. Bo kept an eye on that swath of darkness, knowing that it would be a good place for danger to lurk. Because of that alertness, he wasn’t surprised when a man suddenly stepped out of the shadows into the trail, blocking their path as he lifted a long, sinister-looking object in his hands.

  “Hold it, you two!” the man shouted. “Don’t try anything funny, or I’ll blow you right out of the saddle with this shotgun!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Bo knew that at this range, a double load of buckshot from a scattergun’s twin barrels would shred him and Scratch into something resembling raw meat. That was why, under normal circumstances, he would have reacted very carefully to a threat like that.

  These weren’t normal circumstances, though, and…

  “That’s not a shotgun,” Bo said.

  The stranger jabbed the object at them. “It damn sure is,” he insisted, “and if you don’t drop your guns and get down off those horses right now, you’ll be sorry!”

  Scratch looked over at Bo and asked, “Broken branch o’ some sort, ain’t it?”

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Bo answered with a nod.

  The stranger tried to brazen it out. “I’m not fooling now!” he said. “I’m warning you—”

  “Give it up, son,” Bo said. “It’s not going to work.”

  “Nice try, though,” Scratch added. “That looks a little like a shotgun, I reckon, in bad light. If you hold your mouth just right, tilt your head, and squint a mite.”

  The man uttered a disgusted curse and flung down the thing in his hands. It broke in two with a crack, confirming not only that it was a tree branch, but that it was rotten as well.

  “All right, go ahead and shoot me,” he said. “I tried to hold you up and steal your goods and horses, so I guess I’ve got it comin’ to me.”

  “We’re not going to shoot you,” Bo said. “Come over here.”

  The man hesitated, then shrugged and walked closer to them. Bo had thought he recognized the would-be robber, but now he was sure of it. The man’s dark suit and hat and fair hair revealed his identity. His voice was even a little familiar from the pleading he had done back in the settlement.

  “We’re the fellas who saved you from that mob, you know,” Bo said.

  “Son of a bitch!” Scratch exclaimed. “It is him!” He urged his horse forward a step. “What are you doin’ out here, mister?”

  “What do you think?” the swindler who had called himself Charles Wortham said. “I’m trying to stay as far ahead of those crazy bastards as I can. I don’t want anything to do with hot tar and chicken feathers!”

  Bo said, “They might not bother with that next time.”

  “They might just take you straight to the nearest hangin’ tree,” Scratch added.

  “There’s not going to be a next time,” the stranger vowed. “I’ve learned my lesson. I follow the straight and narrow from now on.”

  “Sure,” Bo said. “That’s why you pretended to have a shotgun and threatened to kill us with it unless we gave you our horses.”

  For a moment, the man didn’t say anything. Then he chuckled and said, “Well, you can’t blame a gent for trying.”

  “Actually, you can,” Scratch said. “You can even shoot him.”

  “I didn’t actually do anything!” the man protested. “You said it yourself. That’s not even a real shotgun.”

  “Son,” Bo said, “even if it had been, I don’t reckon we would’ve been in all that much danger.” He paused. “What’s your name?”

  The swindler dusted off his clothes, straightened his coat, and tucked his thumbs in the lapels. “My name is Charles Wortham,” he said. “I work for the—”

  “Don’t even try that,” Bo warned him. “We heard all about it back in town.”

  “Oh.” The stranger was abashed, but only for a second. “My name is really Jake Reilly.”

  “Are we supposed to believe that?”

  “As it happens, it’s true.”

  “You tried to cheat those folks back there,” Scratch accused.

  “I would have gotten away with it, too,” Reilly said, and there was a note of pride in his voice. “That is, if Harding hadn’t had to go and ruin everything.”

  “Don’t you even feel the least bit ashamed?” Bo asked.

  “Let me tell you something,” Reilly said, “something that everybody in my line of work knows. Every single person on the face of the earth has at least a little bit of larceny in his or her soul. That’s what you have to appeal to if you want to make the schemes work. A man who wants to get something for nothing is the easiest to cheat.”

  “But those folks back yonder weren’t tryin’ to get somethin’ for nothin’,” Scratch argued. “They just wanted the railroad to come to their town.”

  “So they could get rich. Everybody who handed over a deed to me would never have done it if he hadn’t believed that he’d make a lot more money in the long run by doing it.”

  Bo shook his head. “We can go round and round all night arguing about this, and it won’t accomplish a blamed thing.” He extended a hand toward Reilly. “Are you coming or not? If you are, climb up here behind me.”

  Scratch and Reilly both stared at him. It would have been hard to say which of them was more surprised by Bo’s offer.

  Scratch found his voice first. “You’re askin’ the likes o’ him to ride with us?”

  “I won’t leave any man afoot,” Bo said. “Not even a swindler and con artist like our friend Jake here.”

  “He ain’t my friend,” Scratch said. “And I think you’re loco for not leavin’ him here.”

  Bo smiled. “Wouldn’t be the first time you thought I was loco, would it?”

  “Well…not hardly.”

  Grinning, Reilly came forward to reach up and clasp Bo’s wrist. “I’m surely obliged to you for the ride, Mister…?”

  “Creel,” Bo introduced himself. “Bo Creel. My partner is Scratch Morton.”

  “I’m sure pleased to meet you both.” With a grunt of effort, Reilly lifted himself onto the back of Bo’s dun and settled himself behind the saddle. “It was gonna be a mighty long walk to the next town.”

  “We won’t get there tonight,” Bo told him. “We’ll have to find a place to make camp before too much longer. I wouldn’t mind putting a few more miles between us and that settlement, though.”

  Reilly laughed. “You and me both, brother. You and me both.”

  Now that he appeared to be out of immediate danger and wouldn’t be forced to wander through the night on foot, Reilly’s natural, easygoing arrogance had returned. Bo sensed that it was as much a part of the man as his blond hair.

  “What happened to your horse?” he asked. “I reckon you did have a horse?”

  “I sure did. A fine little mare. She’s back there in the livery stable, though…a livery stable co-owned by Tom Harding, I might add…so I don’t think I’ll be going back to get her.”

  “Not unless you want to risk a dose o’tar and feathers again,” Scratch said.

  “How about a gun?” Bo asked.

  “I had a pocket pistol. They took it away from me when they stormed into my hotel room, the barbarians.”

  “So you don’t have a thing?”

  “The clothes on my back,” Reilly answered. “And my charm.”

  Scratch made a disgusted noise in his throat to indicate just how charming he thought Reilly was. Bo said, “Well, maybe you can make a fresh start in the next town we come to. You can probably get a job in a store or a livery stable or some such.”

  Reilly reached around and held up a hand, wiggling the long, slender fingers. “Does that look like a hand that should be loading flour sacks or mucking out stalls? If you’ll stake me to a
dollar or two, Mr. Creel, and let me find a poker game in some saloon, I’ll run that up to plenty of money in no time.”

  “By cheating?” Bo asked. “And call me Bo. Even as old as I am, Mr. Creel is still my father.”

  “I don’t have to cheat,” Reilly boasted. “I can take these yokels for plenty just by playing fair and square. Of course, if I need to shade the odds a little…”

  Scratch exploded. “A damn tinhorn! You’ve got a blasted cardsharp ridin’ with us, Bo!”

  “Afraid he’s going to get us into trouble?” Bo asked dryly. “It seems to have a way of finding us anyway.”

  “Maybe so, but that ain’t no reason to give it a helpin’ hand.”

  Scratch continued to mutter in disgust as Bo said to Reilly, “You don’t need to get into any poker games, Jake. Some good honest labor will get you back on your feet again.”

  “I thought you just dressed like a sky pilot,” Reilly said. “I didn’t know you were going to start preaching at me, or I might not have accepted that ride.”

  Bo lifted the reins as if getting ready to bring the dun to a halt. “I’ll let you get down right now, if you want.”

  “No, no,” Reilly said hastily. “There’s no need for that. We’ll talk about what I’m going to do next once we get where we’re going.” He couldn’t resist adding, “For a couple of saddle tramps, you two are sure full of advice about how a fellow ought to live.”

  That brought on a fresh round of muttering from Scratch, but Bo just ignored the comment. A few minutes later, he swung the dun off the trail and onto an even narrower path that led upward through the trees. Scratch followed, and a minute later they came out into a small clearing, just as Bo had expected.

  “This’ll do,” he declared. He waited until Reilly had slid down from the dun’s back, then dismounted as well. Scratch had already swung down from the saddle.

  Not much light penetrated into the clearing since it was surrounded by tall pines, but the Texans had good enough eyes despite their age to let them see what they were doing as they unsaddled the horses. “Look around and find us some firewood, Jake,” Bo told Reilly.

  “Look around?” Reilly repeated. “How can I look around? I can’t see a blasted thing!”

  “Sure you can,” Bo said. “Just relax and wait a minute. Open your eyes. Don’t squeeze them half-shut like you would if you were in some smoky saloon.”

  “I wish I was,” Reilly muttered. But after a few moments, he began moving around the clearing and bending over to pick up broken branches small enough to use as firewood.

  “Careful you don’t grab a shotgun by mistake,” Scratch gibed.

  A few minutes later, Bo had a tiny fire burning inside a circle of rocks he had carefully arranged so that they threw back the heat from the dancing flames. Reilly looked on skeptically and said, “You can’t cook anything with a fire that small.”

  “Hide and watch,” Scratch said.

  “And you don’t have to eat if you don’t want to,” Bo added.

  “Now, I didn’t say that…”

  Bo fried bacon, made some fresh gravy with the grease, and heated biscuits left over from that morning’s breakfast. Simple fare, but good and filling. Reilly pitched in and ate his share…a little more than his share maybe.

  When the meal was over and the cleaning up had been done and the flames were burning down to redly glowing embers, Bo and Scratch walked over to check on the horses, leaving Reilly slumped on a log by the fire.

  “We’re gonna have to stand watch all night to keep that young coyote from runnin’ off with our horses and all our gear,” Scratch warned. “Wouldn’t put it past him to try to murder us in our sleep.”

  “I don’t think he’s quite that bad,” Bo said. “And we’d be standing guard anyway, in case Harding and his men come after us.”

  “Which we wouldn’t have to be worryin’ about if we hadn’t stepped in to give Reilly a hand,” Scratch pointed out.

  Bo shrugged. “What’s done is done. Now we make the best of it.”

  “We could cut him loose, let him fend for himself.”

  “It may come to that,” Bo admitted. “But I reckon we can afford to see how the hand plays out.”

  Scratch gave an eloquent snort in response to that.

  By the time the Texans came back to the fire, Reilly had slumped down off the log, stretched out on the ground, and was sound asleep, low-pitched snores coming from him. “I’ll stand first watch,” Scratch volunteered, and Bo nodded. It didn’t really matter who took the first turn and who took the second. Both men were accustomed to making do with a minimal amount of sleep when they had to.

  Contrary to Scratch’s worries, the night passed peacefully. Reilly didn’t budge from his spot beside the log, and he slept like a log, too. Nor was there any sign of Tom Harding and his men. As the sky lightened with the approach of dawn, Bo hoped that Harding had decided losing two of his gun-wolves was enough.

  Bo had bacon frying and coffee boiling by the time the savory smells woke Reilly. The young man sat up, ran his fingers through his tousled blond hair, and yawned. “That sure smells good,” he said with a grin.

  Bo used a piece of leather to protect his hand as he picked up the coffeepot and filled an extra tin cup he had taken from his saddlebags. He held it out to Reilly, who took it and sipped gratefully on the strong black brew.

  Scratch slipped into camp with a Winchester tucked under his arm. “Trail down below looks clear,” he reported. He had gone down to have a look a few minutes earlier.

  “I got to wondering about something,” Reilly said. “Are there any Indians around here?”

  “Hostiles, you mean?” Bo asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Bo shook his head. “Not to speak of. Most of the Indian trouble now comes from the Apaches over in Arizona Territory.”

  “Come to think of it, though,” Scratch said, “there are still a few bands of renegade ’Paches in the mountains over west of here, and they come out to raid ever’ now and then.”

  “Do you think we’ll run into any of them?” Reilly asked with a worried frown.

  “It’s not likely,” Bo told him.

  “But if we do, you don’t want to let ’em take you prisoner,” Scratch added with a leering grin. “They can keep a poor devil alive for days whilst they’re havin’ their fun torturin’ him.”

  Reilly shuddered.

  When breakfast was finished, Bo and Scratch cleaned up the camp. Reilly helped grudgingly. Then they saddled the horses and rode back down the hill to the main trail, Reilly once again behind Bo on the dun’s back.

  The three men continued south, and around mid-morning Scratch suggested that Reilly ride double with him for a while. “It ain’t that I’m all that fond of you, mister,” he informed Reilly bluntly. “But it ain’t fair to Bo’s horse to make him carry you all the time.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Reilly said as he dismounted and then climbed up behind Scratch. “As long as I’m not walking, I don’t care who I ride with.”

  This was magnificent country through which they rode. Up ahead, a rugged slope littered with huge boulders loomed to the left of the trail. A mountain goat bounded from rock to rock with almost supernatural grace and agility.

  Pretty though the scene might be, Bo was eyeing the slope with a wary frown when Scratch said, “Somebody up ahead of us.”

  Bo lowered his eyes to the trail and saw a lone man riding in the same direction they were. He said, “That fella ought to turn around and come back. I don’t like the looks of those rocks up there. I can see a little dust, like they’re trying to shift—”

  At that moment, one of the boulders broke free of its precarious perch. It began to roll down the slope, striking another large rock with a crunching impact. That one moved, too, and suddenly, in the blink of an eye and with a mighty roar, an avalanche began sliding down the side of the mountain…

  Straight toward the lone, luckless rider who found h
imself directly in the deadly, earth-shaking path of thousands of tons of rock and dirt.

  CHAPTER 5

  As Bo, Scratch, and Reilly watched in horror, the man on horseback ahead of them jerked his mount in a tight circle, his head whipping back and forth. Bo knew the questions that had to be going through the man’s mind: Can I outrun it? Which way should I go?

  He answered those questions by spurring his horse into a hard run back the way he had come, toward the Texans and Jake Reilly.

  Looking over Scratch’s shoulder, Reilly gasped, “He’ll never make it!”

  “He’s got a better chance comin’ this way than goin’ straight ahead,” Scratch said. “But it’s gonna be mighty close. If that rock slide misses him, it’ll just be by a whisker.”

  Reilly surprised Bo a little by asking, “Is there anything we can do to help him?” So far, Reilly hadn’t struck Bo as the sort to care about anyone other than himself. Maybe seeing someone trapped and about to be overwhelmed by an unstoppable force of nature had touched something human inside Reilly.

  “It’s all up to him and his horse,” Bo said. “Say a prayer for him if you like. That’s about all we can do.”

  Reilly swallowed and asked nervously, “We’re well clear of it, aren’t we?”

  Scratch nodded. “Yeah, it’ll miss us by several hundred yards. We don’t have to worry about being caught in it.”

  All three of them had been forced to raise their voices to be heard over the growing rumble of the avalanche. It was a terrible, awe-inspiring sight as it swept down the mountain, too powerful to be halted by anything any puny human could do. Dust billowed up in a huge cloud, obscuring the slope. Smaller rocks began to pelt down in the trail around the fleeing rider, who leaned far forward over his horse’s neck and urged the animal on to its greatest speed.

  “Son of a gun,” Scratch breathed. “I think maybe he’s gonna make it.”

  The lone rider might have escaped, just as Scratch said, if at that moment a rock the size of two doubled fists hadn’t struck him in the head. It was only a glancing blow, but it was enough to knock the man out of the saddle. He pitched to the ground, rolling over and over as the now riderless horse raced on, caught up in a frantic, panic-stricken flight.